


Issue of Miracles

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Black Opera -Mary Gentle
Genre: Black Opera Spoilers, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-02 19:55:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13325355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: By the time he’d found the man a black tunic that might moreorless fit, Conrad had had time to consider the potential cost of his amusement.“Signore Conte,” he said formally to the man frowning at slightly too tight seams in the mirror. “You are a guest in my house and all its resources are of course yours to draw upon as you please. I must ask you to accept my apology for not making this clear earlier.”Roberto considered Conrad’s reflection. “No.” he said slowly. “I don’t think so. Not this time.”





	1. Temporary Exiles

**Author's Note:**

> This begins a few weeks after the end of the novel and contains major spoilers.

As Conrad Scalese came down the gangplank he heard dogs barking for the first time in months. There had been no dogs left in Naples. In front of him Roberto Capiraso turned unexpectedly to the right and he quickened his pace to catch up easily with the slow limp. 

“Where are you going?”

“To find lodgings. I’ll send a message when I’m done.”

Conrad pushed in front of him and turned round. “And when the landlord wants paying? We’d established that an opera can be written from debtor’s prison, but it’s inconvenient for all concerned. There’s a bed at the villa, three meals a day, a piano and all the pen and ink you need, Roberto. Whatever other luxuries a nobleman might be used to is your problem.”

Roberto’s eyes had darkened. “I’m hardly in a position to tell you to go to hell.”

“And whose fault is that? This way.”

 

He’d barely had a chance to see the new house before they’d left for Naples. As they reached the door in the darkening gloom he could see a low light through the windows. The knock brought Isaura - or possibly Paolo-Isaura still, since no skirts were apparent- and a hug so enthusiastic it made him temporarily forget his troubles. 

“Corradino! We didn’t expect you for weeks- months, even.” She bowed with a hint of restraint to Roberto, who nodded back.

“Plans changed,” Conrad said with deliberate vagueness, and stepped forward to embrace his brother-in-law coming up behind her. “Are the guest rooms free?”

“Yes. I’ll get Maria to air them.” Isaura said.

“And what would you have done if they hadn’t been?” Roberto asked in a low voice from behind him.

“Put you in the servants’ quarters.” Conrad said without hesitation. “Are we too late for supper, Tullio?”

They were not too late. Supper was civil but no-one said very much. Afterwards Roberto disappeared into the hastily aired guest quarters and Conrad unpacked his few belongings into what was his own bedroom, though he’d never yet slept in it, while Tullio sat on the bed and watched. 

“So how is she?” Tullio finally asked.

“Well, as well as she can be given her condition. Busy. They have accepted her for now, but if she fails them there will be little tolerance.” He shuddered at the though of what might happen then.

“And what are you doing here rather than there, Corrado?”

Conrad smoothed out a tunic one handed and hung it up. “She says that she cannot spend her time on both the dead and the living, not for now. We have been banished, temporarily, as too much distraction, until her permitted season for music starts.” There was more than that but not for other ears, even these ones.

“We, is it still?” Tullio asked.

Conrad suppressed an automatic wince. Even the Returned Dead had judged them, but when he looked up he saw neither disgust nor scorn in his friend’s face but genuine concern and a little amusement.

He managed a smile back at the latter. “Still we, and not likely to change.”

“I can’t help but have a little curiosity. About the logistics.”

“You’ll have to stay curious, then.” Conrad told him. “I don’t enquire into the secrets of your marriage bed.”

That was a sudden and glorious smile that had nothing at all to do with Conrad. He felt a brief and unfair stab of envy for it, then relief that at least something was going well. 

 

The summons to the court came early the next day. Conrad was laying out his best clothes when a flustered Maria came knocking at his dressing room door, both Paolo and Tullio being absent.

“I’ll deal with it,” he reassured the servant and he pulled an old jacket around his shoulders as he walked down to the wash room in the servants’ quarter. 

The sight of the Conte di Argente with his arms up to his elbows in soapy water was oddly fascinating. Conrad waited a second too long to announce himself and Roberto looked up to catch him watching. A slight blush crossed his features.

“I’ll pay for the soap,” he said.

“Do you have any idea at all of what you’re doing?” Conrad asked. The sodden material looked like silk to him, and ruined.

“Of course not.” the Count said sharply. “Why would I know how to wash clothes?” 

There had been years when Conrad had been short of the money for a laundress more often than not. He walked forward and took the dripping silk tunic out of Roberto’s hand. “I’ll see what Maria can do with this. For now you’d best borrow something of mine. We represent the Governor-General of Naples; we can’t come before the King with one of us looking like a tramp.” 

Roberto limped up to his room behind him, unusually wordless. By the time he’d found the man a black tunic that might moreorless fit, Conrad had had time to consider the potential cost of his amusement. 

“Signore Conte,” he said formally to the man frowning at slightly too tight seams in the mirror. “You are a guest in my house and all its resources are of course yours to draw upon as you please. I must ask you to accept my apology for not making this clear earlier.” 

Roberto considered Conrad’s reflection. “No.” he said slowly. “I don’t think so. Not this time.” He tugged at the tunic, ”This will have to do. We should not be late.”

 

The audience with Ferdinand II, King of Two Sicilies was brief in public, and much longer in private. Conrad thought that he had never seen the man as impatient.

“Now, Corradino. Tell me about Naples! Every detail!”

Conrad frowned at that. “You can trust Luigi’s reports, Sire.” 

Ferdinand snorted. “My problem with relying on Luigi Esposito’s reports is not that he is Returned Dead but that he is only one man and Naples is a whole city. Now I have two more intelligent eye witnesses and I need your accounts of everything. How much of the city has now been restored?”

It was over three hours before Ferdinand finally sat back, laying down the pen that he had been using to take detailed notes and stretching out his fingers. “Thank you.” And to Conrad. “The Institute will be glad to have you back, Corradino. At least I hope that some of them will.” 

He turned to Roberto. “Does that leave you at a loose end in my city, Signore Conte, with your librettist engaged on his other duties?” His tone made it clear that the ex-Prince’s man at a loose end was not at all desirable. 

“Not at all, Sire. There is the final score to be made from _L’Altezza_ and _Reconquista_.”

“And what will this chimeric opera be about? Moors or Aztecs?”

Roberto didn’t glance at Conrad. “ _L’Altezza_ is the later work. It has structural elements that were undeveloped in the first. Besides, it is more convenient to get the libretto for the Princess altered where necessary.”

Roberto’s intention didn’t surprise Conrad. The man had, after all, two almost master-works; he was hardly likely to be able to resist the call of perfecting them. Nor was he likely to praise the libretto of _L’Altezza_ over that of its rival, not in his current mood.

“So will anyone be paying you for this work?” Ferdinand asked, without any obvious emphasis. What it was to be a King and to be able to ask questions like that. Even Conrad wouldn’t have prodded the man that way.

“No.” the Count replied, similarly blandly.

“Then you will be continuing to live off the charity of your ex-wife’s lover while you are in Palermo?” His tone hadn’t change from that of quiet enquiry.

Conrad reconsidered, fast. That question wasn’t just open and frank. Could the King be regretting his earlier leniency; did he now want the Conte di Argente dead or in exile? He drew a breath to speak against all protocol and Il Superbo lifted a hand to silence him without taking his eyes off Ferdinand. His back was unnaturally stiff.

“Would your Majesty prefer me begging in the street, or lifting barrels? There would be no new music, either way.”

“Taking a commission to compose music is a long way from working the docks.” the King said with a slight smile.

“Not for me,” il Conte said in an absolute tone.

Ferdinand glanced over at Conrad’s deliberately expressionless face, then stood up. “Bring me a copy of the finished _L’Altezza_ as soon as it’s done.” He nodded dismissal to both of them.

The Conte di Argente was swearing under his breath as they passed out from the palace. Conrad felt s certain amount of sympathy.

“He wants the score, but no word of reward for it!” Roberto finally spoke aloud.

“A King’s forbearance is a currency, of sorts. And a poor man with few friends cannot afford too much pride.” Conrad suggested.

Roberto whirled on him. “I am not a poor man! I merely have no money.”

“That’s usually how poverty manifests itself. I should know.” 

“But what do you know of pride, or self respect? You choose to maintain the ex-husband of your lover!” 

Conrad could tell how deeply Ferdinand’s words had cut the Count by the way the man threw them back at him. “If you were truly her ex- husband I would sleep better for it.” He’d tried a lightness to the words and realised that he’d missed. 

Roberto’s expression changed slowly from anger to a malicious delight. “So you don’t accept the situation, then?”

“I accept it, absolutely,” Conrad told him. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it.” He turned without waiting for the rejoinder and strode up the road. After a few minutes he stopped and waited for Roberto’s slow limping stride to catch up but neither of them said any more.

 

The Institut Campi Ardenti absorbed virtually all of Conrad’s time and attention from the moment that he walked through the door. There were three dozen letters waiting for him from philosophers of four continents and twice as many religions, all with more or less polite variants on “what the hell happened in Sicily?” 

Two month’s time passing hadn’t dulled a single detail and Conrad could put together a compelling narrative blindfold. He wrote the draft account in half a day then settled down grimly to the long task of getting a form of words that might be agreed by the Cardinal and Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily before it could be sent. 

As well as that there was the task of finding out how the things in his account had truly been brought about and what if anything had changed. Were the Dead still Returning as they had been? Were the miracles still occurring in the same way? For that matter, how had the Black Opera controlled its very specific miracles? 

There was deep concern about the suppression of gunfire among those in the military who knew about it and they were pressing the Institute for answers that Conrad simply did not have. There should be trials of all the miracles, conducted on a true philosophical basis, but the Church had no interest in lending its Sung Masses to such a blasphemous purpose and secular miracles could not simply be conjured up with a wave of the hand. What was left of his opera company were mostly scattered across Europe by now.

It felt to Conrad as if he were drowning in detail and achieving nothing. He got to his office early and left late and tired, for the first time in years with a complete absence of music in his head.

Walking back into the villa one evening he heard real music, familiar strains played on violin. The Count had co-opted Isaura for his composition and they were generally to be found together in the music room in the evenings with Tullio sprawled on the sofa with a glass of wine, watching. Conrad couldn’t quite decide whether the man suspected Roberto of designs on his wife or whether he simply liked to spend as much time as he could in her presence. 

As far as Conrad could tell, Roberto had been as uninterested in the revelation of his sister’s sex as he was now in the presence of her husband. Paolo-Isaura was a musician and he had a score to be worked on. 

Conrad stood at the door, listening, every changed note clear in his mind. Roberto glanced up and caught sight of him.

“Here.” A small pile of papers on the desk were pushed towards Conrad, who tried not to look too disheartened. He’d been dealing with papers all day. He came forward to pick up the scores and leaf through them, translating the lines to music in his head automatically. 

“You’ve been a great deal more productive than I have today.” He tried not to sound bitter. He’d wanted the Institute job; it was important and it was paying for the house they were living in but he found that he missed the days when he could simply write verse and have his own pile of finished papers to show at the end of it. 

“And when do you intend to do some real work?” Roberto asked. “Or do I need to get someone else to write my alterations?”

Conrad scowled. “Tomorrow. All day tomorrow, for a start.” There went his plan for some rest for the first time all week. 

“Are you telling me that the Atheists’ Cabal doesn’t desecrate the Sabbath with their work?” Tullio’s lazy voice came from the sofa. “I know a fair few people who will be disappointed at that.”

“The what?” Conrad demanded? 

“Atheists’ Cabal. It’s what they are calling your institute. Didn’t you know?” 

“Che cazzo! But his Eminence the Cardinal is on the board!” Conrad protested. 

“Yet you’re the face of it and everyone knows about you. What else could the atheist miracle-worker Signore Scalese and a bunch of philosophers be doing in there but trying to bring down Mother Church?” Tullio had sat up and seemed serious now.

“I was the King’s appointment!”

“People say that kings have been wrong before.” 

Keeping track of rumours and scandal was Tullio’s job now. Conrad couldn’t afford to dismiss his report outright but he was tired and had no idea what if anything to do about it right now. He glanced around the room. Isaura looked worried. Roberto had gone back to scribbling, apparently uninterested in any of Conrad’s troubles that had no direct bearing on opera. 

“Very well. I will add public education to the list of the Institute priorities, before someone decides to burn us down. Now, if no-one has anything else to add to my workload, I’m going to see if there is anything over from your supper.” 

 

Conrad’s days had been so busy since he arrived back in Palermo that it was only the nights that he spent lonely and longing. Even then, he told himself, nights alone here were far preferable to the ones he’d spent alone in the Governor’s Palace in Naples, almost physically writhing in the knowledge of where his absent lover was. The assurance that the next night would have her back in his arms had been little comfort, since for every night they spent warm and loving there was another when tempers would rise and tears be shed as he came up again and again against her utterly determined refusal to choose. 

He bitterly regretted the way those nights went, watching her sleep at last after their quarrels and their fierce, angry lovemaking. He would tell himself that next time would be a night for delight and tenderness, one where his rival was not so much as mentioned, but jealousy was not always amenable to the best of his resolutions. 

Conrad did not know for certain whether similar quarrels rent Leonora’s nights with her husband. Nora never volunteered anything, Roberto said nothing and he had at least enough self respect not to ask either of them. But Roberto was by no means a generous, forgiving man nor inclined to calmness and even temper. The Comte di Argente had seemed no more surprised than Conrad had been, though equally dismayed, when they were both abruptly banished for a season. 

No new answers came to Conrad as he lay alone, thinking of his distant lover and the man asleep next door. They had both agreed to the twice Returned Dead woman’s solution, given no alternative but to lose her, but living with it was turning out far more difficult than taking that initial step had been. It was a while before he slept.


	2. Verses

“Two separate scores? I thought this was to be _L’Altezza_ alone?” Conrad leafed awkwardly through the papers as he sat at the smaller desk in the music room.

“One opera, two scores,” Roberto said. He was at the piano, eyes closed as he played. “One for the living voice, one for the dead.”

A few of the papers slipped from Conrad’s gloved hand. “This is the opera you want to put on for Leonora in Naples? In the City of the Returned Dead? Are you crazy?”

“It has never been performed in full in front of an audience. Don’t you think it deserves it? That she deserves it?” 

“But what might it do, Roberto? There of all places? Have you not thought of that?”

The Count shrugged. “Miracles are your department now. Just make sure it doesn’t end the world. I’m sure your Institute can manage that much. You’ve months to prepare.” 

“And if I can’t control it? If I make a mistake?”

“You make your mistakes outside opera, Corrado.” Roberto walked around to recover his work from the floor. “And you’ll work better without that affectation.” He nodded at the white gloves.

Conrad tugged the glove off his right hand with his teeth and dropped it on the desk. “Does she know what you propose?”

“Oh yes,” Roberto said. “She thinks it’s an excellent idea.”

“So why didn’t either of you mention it to me?” Conrad demanded.

Roberto waved an airy hand. “It must have slipped our minds in the morning. My apologies. It was pillow talk, after all, and easily forgotten.” He gestured at the left glove. “ Do you intend to wear that thing all the time?”

“Yes I do. Not that it’s any concern of yours.” Conrad was seething at the trap he’d been led into. Pillow talk, was it? Bastard. 

“None whatsoever, but I would have thought that acquiring a reputation for concealment would hardly help with your current problems.”

So he had been listening to Tullio. “It’s a disfigurement, not a conspiracy!” Conrad snapped. 

“Too much opera, Corrado. It makes people believe in stories and therefore in symbolism.” 

Conrad yanked the left glove with the false fingers off. “And what will they believe when they see this?” He still hated the sight of his deformed hand.

“They might remember the story of how it came to be that way. “ Roberto said, coolly. “Or then again they might not. We have an ever-fickle public, after all. Hide behind the gloves if you like when you’re out, but don’t keep fumbling my scores.”

He put the papers down in front of Conrad and pulled out an aria. “If you intend to do any work today you might consider starting with this. We need two lines more.”

Conrad sighed and took the sheet out of his hand.

 

Now that he had been alerted to it, Conrad could not help but be aware of his notoriety as he walked through the streets of Palermo next morning. Children called out to each other behind his back and women drew back as he passed, while men stood with arms folded and legs apart, watching him go. He reached the Institute and passed the single King’s guard at the door with some relief. 

Sitting at his desk, he left the pile of new correspondence and reports untouched while he thought about the matter. He’d become used to living under threat from the Prince’s Men when he had been writing _L’Altezza_ but this public calumny was a different matter. He did not want to hide in the villa for the whole season, nor take to the streets only with a guard, and what about his poor staff? 

It was more than ironic that Roberto Capiraso, who had brought about the deaths of thousands and near enough the end of the world, could apparently walk the streets of Palermo in anonymity, while he, who had done everything he possibly could to save them, was associated in the public mind with catastrophe and viewed with the utmost suspicion.

The latest draft of his report sat on his desk with the Cardinal’s secretary’s fine handwriting covering every page, determined to obliterate every hint of sacrilege against Mother Church. It could be months before it was agreed, and even then how many of the people outside could read or understand it? How could they know what really happened if nobody told then? 

Conrad sat still for a while longer, then he called for his own copyist. “Have we a clean copy of what was sent to the Cardinal’s office last week?” 

“Of course, Signore.” The man looked mildly disappointed that there could be any doubt about the matter. 

“Let me have it, please. And bring fresh ink and more paper.” 

That night he got home early and immediately went to find the Count alone in the music room. “I need you to write music for me, Roberto.”

“I was under the impression that you thought I was already doing so.” Roberto said dryly. 

“Not opera. A popular tune. Something to sell in the streets and sing in the taverns. And it has to be good.” 

"Are you taking up politics now, Corrado?" the Count enquired. 

"Not precisely." He dropped the rough drafts of verses into Roberto's outstretched hand. 

The man leafed through them for a few minutes. “Don’t tell me that the Church approved this?” 

“It's not an official publication of the Institute. I don't need their permission.” 

“Nor that of the King?” Roberto asked. 

“I suspect that the King would prefer not to have to make a judgement on the matter.” 

“That's quite a risk you're proposing to take on a supposition. If he doesn't make a decision beforehand he might still be pressured to take action afterwards, or to allow the Inquisition to take it. Certain of these lines could well be argued to be blasphemous.” 

“I know,” Conrad said. “But there's no other way to have the truth known. Will you do it?” 

“No.” Roberto said. “Ask your sister-brother to do it.” 

“I can’t, “ Conrad said, bluntly. “She’s married to Tullio.” 

Roberto frowned slightly. “And Rosso is the king’s intelligence agent. I see your problem. Still, no. I have my reputation to consider.” 

“I never mentioned you by name!” Conrad protested. 

“You mention very few names, except your own, repeatedly. I hadn’t realised your vanity extended this far. But that’s not what I meant. I write opera. This is doggerel.” 

He dropped it on the desk in a clear show of disdain.

“I wasn’t proposing that you sign your name to the score, Capiraso! I certainly don’t intend to sign mine to the verses.” 

“There would be no need for signatures. It has your very particular penmarks all over it and where else will people imagine you got your music from, assuming that it’s any good? No. You can’t have a single note.” He watched Conrad with a small smile. “I’m intrigued, though. Why on earth did you think that I might help you just for the asking?” 

Conrad stared at him, somewhat bewildered by the unexpected rejection. “Simple gratitude, perhaps? This costs you nothing. I have provided you with everything that you need since you came to Palermo.” 

“Not everything.” the Conte di Argente said, his voice cold now. “The luxuries a nobleman might require I have had to provide for myself, remember? And one of those is satisfaction for an insult given. No, Scalese. Find someone else to write your tune and glorify your heroics. You can expect no personal favours from me.” 

He picked up his own papers and limped out of the room. 

 

Conrad could tell that Isaura was hugging some delight to herself as they say down to supper. She didn't wait for the first course to announce it. 

"I have the commission!" 

The news jolted Conrad out off his grim mood. "Congratulations! Violin and piano?" 

"To follow Santoni's piece, no less!" 

It was a well known concert hall and her first major independent commission; a matter of real significance for all that the fee would no doubt charitably be described as moderate. Tullio was glowing with pleasure. 

Conrad glanced over at Roberto, who might have been living on just this kind of commission but wasn't, but the man was focused on Paolo. "After Santoni's? You'll want something with some gravitas. That piece with the triplet in the second half could do as a start, if you take down the phrase instead of up... " 

"Signore Count," Isaura said cheerfully, "Shut up long enough to let me write my own commission! Then I will show you and you can tell me all the things that are wrong with it if you will." 

Roberto shrugged. "Doing it my way would save time," he said but there was a smile on his lips and no sign at all that he took offence. 

Cazzo! They are not just fellow composers but friends! The thought hit Conrad as a physical pain across his scalp and for a moment he couldn’t work out what was so terrible, only that something most undoubtedly was. 

“Corradino?” That was Tullio, deep voice concerned. 

“Headache,” he managed, truthfully enough, though it was not the horror of hemicrania. He pushed back his chair. “Congratulations again, Paolo. If you’ll excuse me, I need to lie down.”

The familiar arm around his shoulder walked him to his room. “Do you need anything for the pain? I have an assignment this evening but I could send a message to delay it.” 

“Not right now. I think it might pass and then I could sleep until breakfast. Go to your meeting, brother.” 

“If you sleep through it that would be a first time.” Tullio sounded surprised. “Well, if you need anything Paolo will be in the house.” 

The door closed quietly and Conrad lay back on the bed, the knuckles of his right hand pressed tight to his temple. 

After half an hour or so he heard the intermittent strains of the violin, quieter than usual, and soon after that the piano joined it. He listened to brief snatches of variations on the piece that Roberto had mentioned, imagining the players; her frown of concentration as she bowed, his faint smile as his long fingers moved across the keys. 

What in all hells was wrong with him? Why shouldn't they play together? Roberto’s unexpected display of naked ill-will after months of what had felt like working together well enough had shocked Conrad but he was not a child to sulk at being left out of others’ friendship, and Paolo-Isaura certainly did not need or want her brother’s approval for her associations. So why did he want to storm into the music room right now and drive Roberto Capraso out of his house?

The music kept on and on, louder now. He was supposed to have a headache- hell, he did have a headache, worsening every second, and eventually he could bear no more of it. He blundered his way to the music room and opened the door.

Isaura dropped the bow. “Corradino? Oh, my poor brother! I’m sorry! We were trying to keep quiet but we got distracted. You look terrible. Not another note tonight I promise, absolutely!” 

Roberto merely stood up and walked towards the door. 

Conrad reached a hand out to stop him on the threshold. “Wait.”

For a moment he though that the man would physically push past him, but Roberto stopped with Conrad’s fingers touching his chest. “What do you want?”

The question only stoked Conrad’s rage. “I want to talk to you. Alone.”

Roberto looked around at Paolo. "Your brother's indisposition had apparently deprived him of the last vestiges of courtesy. Would you be so kind as to excuse us?" Every syllable was exquisitely and deliberately aristocratic. 

Conrad held his breath and with it his temper for a full six counted seconds while Isaura's eyes flickered between them but " Of course " was all that she said. 

They both stood aside to let her leave. Roberto closed the door and seated himself at his usual desk. His eyes were cold as he watched Conrad but he said nothing. 

“Why is it,” Conrad burst out, “that when she laughs you do not take offence?" 

“That's your question? Really?” Roberto's tone suggested that it was a ridiculous one. 

“Yes it is.” 

Roberto tired his head slightly, looking at Conrad as if he were somewhat insane. "Paolo speaks without malice as she always has. Her motives have never been deliberately insulting." 

"Nor so have mine!" Conrad said indignantly. 

"Liar," Roberto said, a little tiredly. "You cannot resist gloating over my misfortunes, Corrado. It may be expedient for now that I live under your roof but I do not have to grovel." 

“I do not mock you,” Conrad insisted, but he remembered the wash tub and his words were less charged with conviction than they might have been. "It does not matter in the least to me that you have nothing. God knows that I've had nothing myself for most of my life." 

“Do not compare my condition with yours,” Roberto said coldly. 

“Because I am your social inferior, Conte di Argente?”

“Because you have always been a librettist who happened to be poor, whereas I was a rich nobleman who wrote operas.” Roberto’s voice was bitter. “Now you are a librettist who happens to have a small amount of money, and what am I? To Paolo I’m a composer still. To you?”

At Conrad’s silence he stood up. “I think we’re done here.”

“Not yet.” Conrad said. “Wait. Please, Roberto.” 

“When will you grasp that I truly care nothing for your wishes?” He stalked out of the room as well as his limp would allow.

Isaura found her brother still sitting at his desk a while later. 

“Oh Corradino! Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Why not?” Conrad said gloomily, and gave her an edited version of the conversation he had just had, concluding with an unhopeful “So what do I do now?”

“What you do best,” she said. “Write it as a scene in a libretto. The rivals confront each other, misunderstanding are corrected, the truth is revealed and there is a reconcilation, or there is not.” Her eyes were dark and for once serious. “You have never been able to put yourself in his shoes, Corradino, unsurprisingly in the circumstances, but if you write his words for him you would have no choice but to understand.” 

“We are not opera characters,” he protested. “I can’t apologise to the Count in song!” But he was already drawing the inkwell towards him. 

“Just write it,” she suggested, “and see.”

Conrad wrote, aware after a while that Tullio was in the room refilling the lamps without disturbing him, used to his ferocious concentration. He wrote for a long time after that. Finally he dropped the pen from cramping fingers and blotted the last page. 

He had strayed a long way from his argument with the Conte di Argente. His characters had taken on a life of their own to the point where he barely recognised either of them. And as for the content; well, there was no opera house censor in Italy that would pass it. Conrad was not entirely sure why he had written the scene as he had but he had to admit that the bellowing on-page arguments had felt somewhat cathartic, even if ludicrous. He would burn the papers in the morning but there were a few lines he thought might be good enough to use again in a rather different context. 

He looked up and saw Roberto standing in the doorway, absolutely still. For all Conrad knew the man might have standing been there fore ten seconds or an hour. 

“I was told what you are writing. Am I to read it?” the Count asked.

“No!” Conrad’s crippled hand stretched protectively over the papers, and he said more politely, “Too little of truth and too much of fiction. Neither of those are to either of our advantage.” 

“Still, I am curious to see what you have written. I could trade it for the song you need.”

“Alas, still no,” Conrad said with some reluctance. “I swear that you would not recognise yourself or me in these pages. Characters take on a life of their own. What this man sings has no reference to what I think.” 

“Are you sure?” Roberto asked. “What does he sing?”

“Why are you asking?” Conrad countered.“I thought you didn’t care what I said.”

“I have some interest in what you write,” Roberto said. “It’s just a pity that when you speak such nonsense comes out of your mouth.”

“Well, let me add to it.” He stood, his hand still hovering over the papers as if Roberto might make a lunge for them. “I am truly sorry for insulting you over a matter that does not even comprise one of your many character flaws. In my poor defence, I would point out that you are, then and now, the composer of “Il Reconquista d’Amore”, the Conte di Argente and Leonora’s husband, and it feels as if I start this race so far behind you that a little unsporting behaviour on my behalf does no more but keep you just in sight.”

Roberto snorted. “Is that what your papers say?” 

“Very roughly and in some truly execrable verse. It was already late and I was remarkably tired by then.” 

“And what did I reply?”

“’You’ didn’t do anything.” Conrad said defensively. “I was writing for opera, not a depressingly mundane quarrel between two men old enough to know better, so naturally I threw in an extra theme or two. I didn’t for one moment intend anyone to read it.”

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Roberto said. “What themes, Corradino?”

The pet name sounded odd as usual from Roberto’s tongue. Conrad wondered if the man even noticed that he used it. “This is meant to be an apology,” he said. “not an opportunity to offend you further.” 

“Why would it offend me?” Roberto enquired. “You have told me repeatedly that these characters are no reflection on ourselves.” He stepped forward and Conrad slammed his gloved palm awkwardly on the papers in panic, sending them all sliding away from the silk-covered wooden fingers. 

Roberto dropped to one knee with an audible wince and scooped up a couple of pages, then retreated, with remarkable alacrity given his bad leg, to an unassailable position between the piano and the window and started to read.

“So, our singer can never forget the secret that he has been told, never forgive the teller, never live with the shame. Poor fellow.” His voice dropped and he started to read in silence. Conrad could only stand on the other side of the piano and protest.

“Signore Conte. Please. This is not the action of a gentleman.”

“Nor was betraying the whole of the Two Sicilies,” Roberto said without looking up from the page. “Hush. This is exciting stuff, if a little hysterical.” 

He read the second page then came out and handed them back to Conrad with a small bow. “So that’s your additional theme. An unusual one for opera, in the Two Sicilies at least. Your man seems to have over-reacted somewhat.”

“It’s opera,” Conrad said sulkily, “Everyone over-reacts. And it was just a plot device; I could not have the apology politely accepted with the scene barely two thirds of the way through.”

“Still, ending on the vow of revenge is painfully clichéd, If you’d asked my advice as a composer I’d have told you to end it with them in bed. Much more entertaining for both the audience and the performers.” 

Conrad knew he was being mocked now, but given his stupid choice of theme for the damn thing he couldn’t see a way out of it. “And when the Inquisition arrives?” 

“We’ll make it a private performance,” Roberto’s voice was amused. “A drawing room opera of the most exclusive kind.”

Conrad saw a shimmer of light through the shutter. Dawn was here. “Why are we standing here talking such nonsense?” he demanded rather hopelessly.

“Because you write honest verse even when you lie to yourself, and I prefer my ending to yours.” Roberto came up to the desk and stood stiff backed in front of Conrad. “I accept your apology, Signore. I imagine that the inevitable awareness of your own comparative inadequacy could hardly but drive you to offence, in the circumstances.”

That was close to what Conrad had said but reflected back to him in the most unflattering terms. The Count was waiting, lips quirked, to see if he would take offence in his turn.

Conrad was very tired, his thoughts were still half with the characters he’d written and he realised that he had absolutely no idea of what was going on. “Thank you,” he said soberly. “I will do my best in future to confine my critical comments to the divers opportunities that your arrogance and pedantry provide.” 

The Count nodded briefly as if that were settled. “You do agree that my ending is dramatically superior?”

“If you insist,” Conrad was amused at the man’s persistence about an opera scene that would not ever exist. 

“Good.” Roberto limped back to the door, shoved a chair in front of it, walked back and kissed him.


	3. Inequalities

To the already exhausted Conrad the next few minutes seemed like a bizarre extension of his ridiculous verses. He was fairly certain that they ought to talk about what was happening but Roberto showed no interest in what he might have to say. 

He could insist that they stop but it seemed likely in that event that they would never start again and that would be a pity given just how sensually intriguing kissing a man with a real beard was turning out to be. He thought about that, and about what the warm and definite hands were doing under his clothing and about whether the chair under the door would hold if Tullio came by to check that he’d got off to bed at last, because all of these things were easier to think about than that this was Roberto Capiraso’s mouth on his and nothing was going to be the same in the morning.

It was an embarrassingly short time until they were still again, looking at each other, Conrad in the chair, Roberto in front of him, close enough that their knees brushed. Conrad knew that face, could read the slight frown and his heart sank.

“That was not what you wanted,” he said, before the man could say it to him.

“What?” Roberto’s gaze tightened on him. “Of course it was. A little rushed but that can be rectified next time. No, that wasn’t what I was thinking about.”

Conrad wondered how he could possibly be thinking about anything else given the circumstances. “So what is the matter?”

“I took vows of fidelity on my marriage, “ Roberto said. “I had not until now considered breaking then. I do wonder how wise it is to give up my only moral advantage these days over my wife.” He shrugged. “We shall see. You look three quarters dead. Go to bed; I will send a message to the Institute that you are indisposed tomorrow.”

 

Conrad slept long and woke with a clear head. He lay in bed listening to the sounds of the busy city outside and wondering how much of last night had actually happened as he thought that he remembered it. Eventually he got up and went hunting for a very late breakfast. 

Roberto was in the kitchen, looking out of the window. As he turned Conrad could see a remarkable amount of silk finery for everyday wear. Armour, he thought. 

“Good morning. Is anyone else around?” 

“Rosso is at the docks all day. Paolo is haunting her concert hall, talking to everyone that she can find. Maria’s mother is unwell again; I have given her the day off.” 

“That was considerate of you.” Conrad very nearly added a gibe about paying her wages but caught himself in time. “I should get to work.”

“They are not expecting you until tomorrow at the earliest,” Roberto said. “Were you perhaps thinking of making your escape without having this conversation?”

The Count stood poised perfectly between the window and Conrad at the table, his voice precise and barely interested but Conrad had known the man for long enough to read the signs of strong emotion. Rather to his surprise he found himself more amused than concerned. 

“This conversation, is it? By all means let us have it,” he said, recovering the remains of yesterday’s pastries from the sideboard. “I trust I didn’t inconvenience you too much by keeping you waiting this morning. I was unaware that you were eager to talk to me. It doesn’t happen very often.” 

“What happened last night doesn’t happen very often either, at least not to me. It might be a regular occurrence for you, for all I know, men and women both.” The voice had turned into a sneer. 

“Vaffanculo!” Conrad spluttered. “I do not take accusations of sexual immorality from a man who grabbed my cock!”

Seeing the Count stiffen in earnest, he raised a placatory hand. “Roberto.” He nearly said ‘brother’, caught himself. “Forgive me. I am a little on edge. If you regret what occurred last night, just tell me so and I swear that it will be as if it never happened.” 

The man was still cold and formal. “Do you regret it?”

One of them was going to have to answer that question first and Conrad supposed that it might as well be him. “No, I do not.” Though he might come to do so if Roberto hated him for it.

The Count stood motionless for a few seconds, then let out a breath. “Something, at least, that we agree on. I suppose as an atheist this means nothing to you.”

“Hardly nothing. And I may be immune to the threat of damnation but frankly the Inquisition terrifies me.” 

Roberto smiled a little at that. “I was il Principe. I am discreet.”

Conrad looked at the window onto the street. “Then we could go somewhere more discreet than this room. Unless there is more conversation to be had?”

“It will wait,” Roberto said. He placed a hand on Conrad’s shoulder as he walked to the door towards the bedroom, the touch galvanising. Conrad stood and came with him, thoughts full of nothing but anticipation.

 

A week later they still had not had any further conversation regarding what they were about. There were always better things to do with their few private hours and minutes. Conrad felt that he ought to be more concerned about this than he was. 

He walked in, early for once from the Institute, and found Tullio in the kitchen and a dog eared, poorly printed score on the kitchen table. Conrad picked it up and read it through, since this seemed to be the appropriate thing to do, admiring again Roberto’s near-martial chorus line. 

“I heard this in the street yesterday, and again today.” he said. 

“Most of Palermo has heard it by now,” Tullio said, his deep voice relaxed. “The King is not happy about it. He would like to know where it came from.”

There was the briefest pause before Tullio spoke again. “I told him that there were lots of people on the Burning Fields that night and most of them have talked to whoever will listen. Anyone in the city could have written it.”

“Anyone could,” agreed Conrad, putting it down again. 

A longer pause this time before Tullio sighed. “Padrone, Things have changed.”

That hurt. “Not so much, my brother, that if you asked I would not tell you anything you want to know.” 

“And what makes you think that I have to ask?” Tullio said, more cheerfully. “You really do not make a good keeper of secrets, Corradino. If you’re by any chance looking for him, Capiraso is in the music room. I heard him playing the love aria between Tayanna and Cortez. I’ll see you at supper.”

 

“Tullio knows about us,” Conrad told Roberto when they were lying on his bed. His head was on the man’s shoulder and his arms around the naked waist.

“He’ll have to die, then,” Roberto said gravely. “Will you kill him or shall I?”

It took Conrad a second to be sure that the man was joking. “I thought you ought to know, that’s all.”

“I did know. We had a chat about the matter a couple of days ago.”

“A chat?” Conrad was bewildered. “What the hell did he say?”

“He gave me the standard protective father speech- if you break my boy’s heart I will hunt you down, that one.”

Conrad cringed at the thought of it. “And you said?”

“I told him that I’d be sure to pass on his concerns to my wife.” 

Conrad laughed out loud at that one, then sobered. “This has got rather complicated, hasn’t it?”

Roberto snorted. “There are only three of us. I tell myself that it can’t get much worse. Speaking of which, we should visit Naples, soon. _L’Altezza_ is as finished as it can be without a company to work with. We need to talk to Leonora about putting together the opera for next season. If we wait too long to start the singers we want will have been hired elsewhere.”

“We are supposedly not welcome in Naples for nearly two months still,” Conrad pointed out.

“If she wants a halfway decent opera to sing in she has no choice but to let us visit,” Roberto said. “Unless you think you can be an impresario by letter? We’ll tell her that we’re not staying long and she can throw us into jail or not as she pleases.”

The thought of seeing Nora again soon made Conrad’s pulse jump, the accompanying emotion distinctly mixed. She had to know, obviously, and not by letter or worse still, rumour going ahead of them. 

 

“You’ll need a larger bed, " the Conte di Argente said seriously. 

Leonora blinked at him. They were all three standing in the newly redecorated Naples' Governor's grand bedroom “A larger bed? How much larger?”

“Three foot wider, at least. Scalese is a annoyingly restless sleeper, but then I imagine you know that.”

Conrad glared at him. “And Il Superbo tends to snore, but then I imagine you knew that too.”

Leonora looked from one to the other of them. “But...are you both really prepared to tolerate...”

“We’re a little past tolerance,” Conrad told her cheerfully. “We find certain advantages to sharing a bed.”

“Oh,” she said, and a hand flew to her mouth. “Oh!” Conrad could see her bemusement harden into something more like anger. “How could you?” She turned on her heel and stalked out, leaving them standing in her bedroom, looking after her. 

“That could have gone better,” Conrad said.

Roberto’s face was black. “How dare she berate us?” 

“She’s only human in many ways still.” Conrad said. “How did you feel when I kissed her?”

“Jealous twice over,” Roberto admitted. 

“Well, then. This is not perfect. Give her enough time to acknowledge that it is better than it was.” 

 

She found then in the music room, some time later, heads bowed close over the piano. Conrad was laughing. 

The door slammed behind her and they both turned around. 

“Nora,” Conrad said. She looked no better tempered than before.

“How long has this been going on? she demanded of both of them.

“You have no right...” Roberto started, voice loud. 

Conrad raised a hand to silence him. “She has every right to know. Three weeks, or since the day that we met, whichever measure you choose.”

“I though you were like brothers!”

“Not quite,” Roberto said. He sounded amused at that rather than angry. “An easy mistake to make. I made it myself, for some time.”

“So do you both intend to leave me?” she demanded.

“Not for a moment!” Conrad said as Roberto said "Don't be ridiculous!" 

Leonora paced around the piano. “And if I tell you that this must stop? That you must choose between this and me?”

Roberto snorted at that. “How often did we tell you that you had to choose, Leonora? How much notice did you take of either of us?”

“It was not the same! This is not fair!”

Conrad placed a gentle arm on her elbow. “This may not feel fair to you but it is at least honest. Trust us, Leonora. This takes nothing away from our devotion.”

She pulled away from him and swept out again. 

Roberto was staring after her, his expression blank. “I could lose her over this,” he said eventually. 

Conrad knew what the man would choose, if he was forced to. He’d make the same choice himself. That didn’t mean that this was not worth fighting for. “Hold out, Roberto. Let her try to understand us a little. It will do her no harm, except a little to her pride. Will you cede her every other night alone with your imagination again?”

“If I have to.” The Count sighed and looked round at him. “How is it that I want you so much now when it is most inappropriate?”

“Because you’re thinking of giving me up?” Conrad suggested, 

“You think in terms of your opera characters,” Roberto complained.

“That’s because there’s truth in the characters I write,” Conrad retorted. “Do you think she will give us credit for our chastity today?”

“Not a chance of it.”

“The English have an expression; Better be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. She might as well be jealous of something as nothing, and there’s a lock on my bedroom door.”

 

The lock was a substantial iron one that would have held against a battering ram. The hinges, on the other hand, didn’t stand up against a single kick from a determined Returned Dead. Leonora stood in the wreckage of the door frame, staring at the two naked men on the bed. With a shriek she crumpled elegantly to the floor. 

Conrad scrabbled off the bed to slip his good hand under her head, watching her flickering eyelids in huge worry. Behind him Il Superbo’s voice was as sarcastic as he’d ever heard it.

“You can sit up now, Leonora. You’re not on a stage and you haven’t had a terrible shock; you’ve merely seen exactly what we told you was going on, and what given your dramatic entry, you obviously expected to see. If you had knocked we would have invited you in.” 

Leonora opened her eyes and scowled at Conrad, then pulled herself up against his shoulder so that she could glare past him at her naked husband. “You betrayed me!”

“Absolute nonsense. There have been three of us in this relationship since Venice. We are merely acknowledging the true position.” He glanced briefly at Conrad. “It’s not negotiable, Leonora. You have a choice; we three can pair off in three different beds or all in yours.” 

“Given how passionately we both love you, we would prefer that it was yours,” Conrad added. 

She walked out. Shortly afterwards they received the message that she would no longer allow either of them into her presence.

 

Conrad spent most of the next few days roaming Naples. He had a drink with some of his old neighbours in the Port district, found that they already knew that _L’Altezza_ would be staged in the city and that they fiercely approved, considering it ‘their’ opera, the opera of the Returned Dead.

He and Roberto spent a full day at the Teatro San Carlo, inspecting the rebuilding and talking to the living designer and the dead workmen. It would be a much improved opera house, with the best staging and acoustics that modern design could manage and it seemed that it would be sufficiently complete in two months time for rehearsals to commence. 

Back at the palace they argued with each other about the singers until they finally settled on a list of mostly familiar names to write to and a back up list for when those on the first declared that they wanted nothing to do with the Conte di Argente, Conrad Scalese, Leonora D’Arienzo or _L’Altezza_ ever again. All they needed was Leonora’s approval. She received the list by messenger, approved it the same way and still refused to see them.

Conrad had half expected that Roberto would break ranks and beg Leonora to forgive him but il Conte’s wife had apparently pushed at his pride too far this time and clearly he did not intend to concede an inch. He had politely invited Conrad to move into his extensive suite of rooms while the bedroom door was repaired and Conrad didn’t move back again afterwards. It was more privacy and time together than they’d had at home and they took full advantage of it, but all the time they were waiting, without ever discussing it, for Leonora to make the next move.


	4. Not Gentle

Conrad was looking through the few texts that had survived of Ferdinand’s once magnificent library when she spoke from the doorway.

“Conrad.” 

“Nora!” He turned, dropping the ash smeared text in his hand.

She looked utterly beautiful but paler even than usual. She beckoned and he followed, until they both stood on a private balcony looking out over the city.

Conrad took her hand and she passively let him. Her fingers were warmer than her expression.

“Explain why you are doing this to me,” she demanded, her eyes on the volcano taking up most of the horizon. 

Their appeals to her sense of justice had got them nowhere. Conrad had another tack prepared.

“You told me once that he made you happy.” 

“Yes,” she said without turning. Her warm hand did not so much as twitch in his. 

“And that I made you happy too.” 

“Yes!” She said emphatically, as if vehemence alone should be enough. “How can I make you believe me, Corradino?” 

“I do believe you,” he said. “But Nora, beloved, can you really not see that there has been little happiness for you in the last few months and far less for us?” 

She turned and glared at him, their hands still linked. “I have not made you stay!” 

“Love of you will always make me stay, my dearest Leonora. But I have been wretched, and Roberto has been wretched, and it seems to me that we have not brought you any noticeable joy and how is that to improve if nothing changes?” 

She moved a step away and her fingers slipped out of his. “I will not... cannot choose between you,” she insisted. 

“No, you will not, and neither of us will give you up even if the tides of jealousy and misery close over our heads and threaten to drown us. But neither Roberto nor I want to keep suffering for your love, Nora. We are not tragic heroes and we have had enough conflict for a lifetime. This is better. Not perfect, but better.” 

She was staring at him, silent. 

“Oh my dear love,” he said gently. “I know you are not the kind of woman who takes any pleasure from seeing her lovers quarrel over her. You are generous and open hearted enough to love us both, after all. You thought you knew our hearts absolutely and now it seems that there is something new and unguessed at in there, maybe even something that excludes or threatens you. I am hardly surprised that you are upset.” 

“Upset,” she said, her voice like steel. “Tell me why I should not be upset when you claim to get more pleasure from his sodomy than from our lovemaking?” 

Conrad took a long breath, then another, holding onto his temper. "If I had said that you would have a right to be angry. What I am saying is that it we go on as we have been, constantly at each others throats, them none of us will find much happiness again. Instead Roberto and I are figuring out our differences in our own way and love your not a jot less for it."

"Tell me, Corradino ." Her voice hadn't softened one iota. "Do you take the woman's role in that bed? I really can't imagine my husband doing so, after all."

"And do you talk to him about my nights with you?" Conrad snapped. "Or do you imagine that I ever solicited indiscretions from either of you?" 

"He's not your lover just because you fuck," she said with scorn. "You might as well owe your discretion as a gentleman to a whore." 

This time it was Conrad who walked out, not trusting his thoroughly frayed temper with any possible reply. 

 

Roberto looked up from a manuscript at he entered the man's quarters. "Well?" 

Conrad shook his head. "If you thought she was furious before you should see her now."

"This is ridiculous," Roberto said. He stood up from the piano stool. "I'm going to speak to her She has to listen to me. She's my wife." 

A warning came automatically to Conrad's lips but he held it back. Of all the things he could do right now, interfering between those two had to be close to the worst. He let the man go and to distract himself he dug out his draft papers on" The Different Types of Miracle" and began to write. 

Minutes dragged into an hour. Eventually a servant knocked at the door. "I am to esxcort you to the Governor General, Signore ." 

"Give me five minutes to change," Conrad was conscious of his ink stained jacket and crumpled shirt. 

The woman was still as only the Dead could be, waiting. Recognition finally came to him. “Felice. You were in my choir.”

The choir of _L’Altezza _, picked from the best of Naples’ amateur singers. They had all died on the night of its first, dreadfully curtailed performance.__

__“Yes, Signore.”_ _

__He felt an urge to apologise but there were no words for how he felt about the Napoli Dead. Instead he called back from the dressing room “Do you still sing?”_ _

__For answer she sang the Ballad of the Burning Fields for him._ _

__Her voice was not nearly strong enough to fill the high and wide rooms of the Palace and her range was limited but the notes were true and clear, unbroken by mortal need to breathe, and Roberto knew how to write a tune to fit an untrained voice. Conrad listened to his own justifications soaring along that compelling, simple melody while he donned an acceptable shirt._ _

__He came out of the dressing room, shrugging his better jacket on and sat listening and wondering if they were about to be expelled from Naples again. As she came to silence again he frowned at her.. "You missed out two verses."_ _

__Her back stiffened. "Those verse are nonsense. We don't sing them here."_ _

__"How is it nonsense?" Conrad demanded._ _

__"A miracle of God Almighty brought us back. Not a.. . a thing! They may think what nonsense they like in Palermo but we believe!" She bobbed a reluctant curtsey. "No offence to you, Signore. But whoever wrote this song was not there and I was! And the Governor will be waiting."_ _

__She left him at the door to Leonora's private quarters. He knocked and strode in, still thinking about what it took to shake people's belief._ _

__Leonora was sitting in a window casement in the late afternoon sunlight, dressed in a deep crimson gown. Her husband was lounging, cross legged, in an armchair up against the opposite wall. His gaze followed Conrad as he entered: hers stayed on the red roofs of the city visible below._ _

__"Good afternoon," Conrad said to both of them. He nearly added "Have I missed anything?" but if they wanted him to know what they'd been doing for the last hour he was certain that they'd tell him._ _

__"Will you give him up, Corrado?" Leonora asked still without turning._ _

__Conrad exchanged a glance with Roberto. "No," he said. How could any of this work if he did?_ _

__"And you. Have you changed your mind?"_ _

__"I see no need to repeat myself." There was no obvious annoyance in Roberto's slow voice._ _

__There was a pause. "Go back to Palermo," she said. "Both of you. I have not time for this now. If you have not tired of this nonsense by the time you return I suppose that it will have to be accommodated. Go! There is a boat sailing on the evening tide." She stood and walked towards her bedroom, still without looking at either of them, and the door slammed shut behind her._ _

__"I wouldn't if I were you," Roberto said, without moving. "She's in no mood to concede anything further and we have a boat to catch."_ _

__“We can’t just leave! Not without some sort of goodbye.” Not after a week of exclusion from her company. He’d done no more than hold her reluctant hand._ _

__There was something smug in Roberto’s expression. Conrad glanced down his front, eyes drawn to a tiny detail awry. “You’ve a button misplaced.” One of twenty or so down his waistcoat. The man usually dressed with impeccable care in front of his mirror. Conrad had seen him do it that morning._ _

__Roberto ran a hand down his front, picked out the mother-of-pearl in the wrong button hole and corrected it, all without looking down._ _

__“And she’s changed her gown,” Conrad said. “I imagine you’ve said your goodbyes then. Did you persuade her that I was best excluded?”_ _

__“You claimed that this would cure jealousy” Roberto reminded him._ _

__“Wouldn’t that be convenient for you both? Well, it’s failed.” Conrad took one more look at the firmly closed door and stalked out._ _

__

__There wasn't enough privacy in the boat to so much as brush fingers, and Conrad wouldn’t have been in the mood even if there had been. For the first time it felt as if this...arrangement was nothing but a way for the Count to get everything he wanted._ _

__Conrad couldn’t get that smile out of his head. How could he possibly have been so stupid as to think that they were no longer rivals? Nora had told him that they weren’t lovers- well, he had never thought they were, not quite, but he’d thought there was something there, something more than lust. Now he wasn’t certain._ _

__Roberto seemed unconcerned by Conrad’s flat refusal to talk to him. He slept as solidly on the boat as if he had been at home. Conrad listened to what sounded to him very much like the snores of an entirely satisfied man and thought about Leonora and his own foolishness._ _

__

__When they reached Palermo he oversaw the stowing of their luggage while Roberto sat waiting in the carriage in front. Conrad gave the driver the address and the fare, then walked rapidly in the opposite direction, towards the Institute._ _

__He wasn’t after work so much as solitude, but as usual following an absence there was a pile of correspondence waiting on his desk. Conrad leafed his way impatiently through an excitable report about an operatic miracle in Berlin from an French natural philosopher who had apparently never seen an opera before. After seven pages of minute yet extremely inaccurate detail about the production the man finally revealed that the tenor had levitated a full fifteen foot in the air at the climax of the third act._ _

__Conrad swore aloud. He’d heard a report of the production- apparently it was a particularly well done effect but surely no-one could be that naive? And even if the man had been, anyone in the audience could have enlightened him. He scrawled “Wires!” in the margin and dropped the letter in the box for his clerk to reply to._ _

__He sat back in his chair for a moment or two before picking up the next letter. The sun was setting and he couldn’t put off the short walk home for much longer._ _

__There was a sudden silence from outside. He could hear the noises of the city but the street vendors and the passers-by in the street outside the window were hushed,and in the pause he could hear the soft thud of marching feet. He started towards the open window but an urgent, breathless voice stopped him._ _

__“Not the window! This way!” Tullio disappeared from the doorway as Conrad started after him. In the hall he could see the man heading towards the ladder up to the roof._ _

__“What’s going on?” Conrad stayed close on the ex-soldier’s heels._ _

__“Inquisition. They’ve come from the villa.”_ _

__“You escaped? What about Paulo?_ _

__“We had no need to escape. They hadn’t come for either of us.”_ _

__“Shit,” Conrad said, pulling himself onto the roof tiles. “The song?”_ _

__“For now.” Tullio led him across the roofscape and down another ladder some six houses away. “And whatever else Capiraso might tell them under interrogation, of course.”_ _

__“They took him?”_ _

__“Yes.”_ _

__“Fuck!” Conrad said. He couldn’t expect Roberto’s discretion to survive the methods of the Inquisition. “We need to get him out. Urgently, Tullio,before they make him talk! The King can do it.”_ _

__Tullio glanced back at him as they made their way quickly down a street. “That’s where we’re going. But has he any reason to do it, brother?”_ _

__That stopped Conrad in his tracks, if only temporarily. He half ran to catch up. Last time Ferdinand had slipped him free of the Inquisition he had needed Conrad desperately and the charges brought against him were hardly convincing. This time- well, Conrad’s work at the Institute wasn’t that important to the King, who might himself have had reason to object to that bloody song, and as for Roberto, the disgraced Count had betrayed his monarch and was currently under neither his protection nor his patronage._ _

__Conrad liked Ferdinand, as much as a commoner might be considered to like a monarch, but he was under no illusion that the King of Two Sicilies would definitely take action against the Church to save Roberto Capiraso from punishment merely as a favour to himself._ _

__Yet there was nowhere else that he could think of to go._ _

__

__Fifteen minutes later Conrad was reminding himself that the feeling of security that came from being inside the palace walls was illusory. The Inquisition could drag him from the small wardroom that Tullio had left him in and the palace guard would not protest. Until- unless- King Ferdinand 11 of the Two Sicilies chose to extend the royal hand of protection over him, Conrad was still a wanted man._ _

__Yet in the quiet of the empty room his heart had finally stopped thumping enough for him to start worrying about Roberto rather than just himself. What might they be doing to him? Conrad was pacing the short distance around the room by the time the guard came for him._ _

__King Ferdinand 11 did not give his usual smile in response to Conrad’s low bow. He remained standing, forcing Conrad to do likewise._ _

__"I have just had the dubious pleasure of reading the warrant for your arrest. Was it vanity or stupidity that caused you to circulate blasphemous verses about yourself in my city?"_ _

__Conrad took a breath, hoping admitting to the song wouldn't backfire. He didn't think that lying to the King would get Roberto released. "Neither, Sire, but an attempt to educate the citizens and thus protect the reputation and the staff of the Institute from the rapidly worsening public mood."_ _

__"And Capiraso? Did he act for the institute as well?"_ _

__"The Count merely wrote a ballad tune as a personal favour for me. He had no involvement in either the words or the publication. The Inquisition had no cause to hold him, Sire."_ _

__"A dangerous favour.” There was no concession in his eyes. “Did he know how dangerous?"_ _

__That was a question to be very careful in answering. Conrad could so easily implicate the man. "I did not consider the verses to be blasphemous, Sire. There should have been no risk to anyone."_ _

__Ferdinand snorted slightly, whether at the statement or the evasion, Conrad couldn't tell. "So are you here to petition for his safety or your own?"_ _

__"Both, your Majesty. But his more urgently in the circumstances. The Inquisition are not gentle."_ _

__"Gentleness does not meet their purposes," Ferdinand said. "But they seldom rush matters and the Conte di Argente had more than his share of ordinary toughness. If it's his survival you concern yourself with then I think you need not worry for a while yet. I do not at present intend to take any action regarding Roberto Capiriso ."_ _

__In the face of that flat statement of Royal intent Conrad could not possibly press the matter further. He could only hope that" at present " meant that the King intended to act once he'd judged that the man who he had already punished once for his betrayal had spent a suitable length of time in the hands of the Inquisition. Ferdinand was not generally a vindictive man, as far as Conrad could tell, but he did not willingly do favours for his enemies._ _

__“As for you,” Ferdinand went on, “I have read the letters from England’s Royal Society that you forwarded to me. I have some questions about them. In particular I wish to know whether their heretical Protestant church truly has no miracles.”_ _

__He didn’t pause long enough for Conrad to respond. “I am sending you to England as my envoy to the Royal Society to investigate these matters. Not incidentally it will mean that you should be out of the reach of the Inquisition for some time. “_ _

__“But _L’Altezza_!” Conrad protested quietly._ _

__“The score is finished, the rehearsals start in six weeks in Naples. A lot can happen in six weeks. And Paolo is quite capable of handling the administration in your absence.”_ _

__He stood by the window, waiting for Conrad’s acknowledgement of his instructions. Conrad hesitated._ _

__“The Conte di Argente might not be alive in six weeks. He might not be whole in six days, Sire! I do not think that the Inquisition will care to leave his hands untouched merely so that he can write music again.”_ _

__“And how will your arrest help him?” Ferdinand inquired._ _

__Conrad swallowed against the idea of those shackles again, but carried on grimly. “I might persuade them that he had no part in the verses.”_ _

__Ferdinand sighed. “That thrice damned man betrayed you every day for months, Corrado, just as he betrayed me. How did he earn such loyalty?”_ _

__“By being a musical genius,” Conrad said, “But I beg that you never tell him I said that! Do you really want to give up any chance of new music from the composer of _L’Altezza Azteca, ossia il Serpente Pennuto_ , your Majesty?”_ _

__From the King’s narrowed eyes he suspected that the man knew that he had not been entirely honest about all his motives. There was no help for it though. Whatever Ferdinand’s private and personal views on unnatural acts between men might be, he had taken oaths to rule as a Christian monarch and Conrad could not assume that he could in any way sanction their relationship._ _

__“Your argument carries a certain persuasion. Go to England, Corradino,” Ferdinand had turned from the window to the papers on his desk. “Take yourself away from trouble for once. Leave your composer’s problems to me.”_ _

__Conrad wanted so much to refuse. The idea of abandoning Roberto to captivity and torture horrified him, but the only man he knew of with power enough to help the Count was giving him a direct command. Slowly, reluctantly, he nodded. “I must set my trust in your Majesty, Sire. I will sail to England.”_ _


	5. Incandescence

The bulb flickered for a second then steadied. Fog swathed the Royal Society building and Conrad was conscious of the heavy rain outside but for the moment he cared only about the brightness. The wires connected to it were wound tight around a heavy metal bar but no battery powered them.

“As you see. Induction,” Faraday said. Two centimetres away a duplicate wire-wrapped bar was attached to a modern battery. 

“It is a truly remarkable phenomenon,” he said. “Thank you for demonstrating it, sir.” 

Michael Faraday, the Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Society, a man barely older than him but whose scientific achievements were already legendary, nodded. “Science will overtake, and, I believe, explain your ‘miracles’, Mr Scalese. Your Catholic Church will discover that this creature of yours from Naples is not God.”

“Not my Church, I assure you,” Conrad said. “And I entirely agree with you, Professor. Set this experiment up anywhere in the world and the light will shine, as often as you attach the battery to the other wire. That is certain knowledge now, held safe in human minds. I wish that my own researches into the miracles could find one cause and effect so definite and so repeatable.”

“You are a rational and educated man,” Faraday said. “Have you not considered abandoning the study of these Popish superstitions for the natural philosophy of Northern Europe?”

Conrad glanced out of the window, at the rain. “The two Sicilies are my home, sir. And while there is much superstition around the miracles, I cannot turn my back on the bare fact of their existence.”

The Scotsman looked briefly uncomfortable at that assertion, as if he wanted to deny just that. Conrad had already established that there were no miracles in London; marvels galore, everywhere that Conrad looked, but nothing supernatural. There were reports of ghosts, but he’d found no trace of Returned Dead living among the ordinary Londoners. Enough plausible accounts from travellers had come to the city that the existence of the miraculous elsewhere was generally accepted but it was considered a foreign oddity and the notion barely disturbed the surface of these people’s lives. 

What would it be like to live in a world of such certainties, where the light went on or off dependent only on the battery and not the faith or emotion of the observer? It didn’t matter. Leonora was dead and alive again, he’d lost half his hand in an impossible crossing of a lava field, he’d spoken to a living creature made up of all human experience. Miracles were so tangled into his soul, metaphorically speaking, that he was never going to escape them. All he could do was to challenge them. 

“My wife is Returned Dead,” he said bluntly to the man, because he found that he couldn’t let that look pass. “It is not something that admits of mistake or confusion, Professor Faraday. She does not consume Lavoisier’s oxygen because she does not breathe. William Harvey’s circulation of the blood is irrelevant to her. She cannot become ill, she will not age, she needs neither sleep nor sustenance, and yet in all other respects she lives. I do not choose to study the supernatural because I reject those natural laws so elegantly demonstrated in this place but rather because I cannot reject the evidence of my own senses.”

He was staring at the bulb again, the filaments outlined bright against his eyelids when he blinked. Across the desk Faraday was silent. 

Finally the man spoke, the Scottish lilt stronger in a voice far quieter than any he’d used to explain his experiments. “May the good Lord preserve you, my friend.” 

 

Despite this unpromising conclusion to the demonstration, Conrad was somewhat astonished to receive an invitation to dinner with Faraday at his club nest day. Over the meal they discussed advances in a number of fields. There was so much that Conrad wasn’t keeping up with; he was no more than the barest amateur in most of these subjects and he felt that the professor must be keenly aware of his deficiencies. 

After a toast in eye-watering Scots whisky to both their Kings Faraday put down his glass. “So. What do you think of the work we are doing here?”

“Remarkable.” Conrad said honestly. “It makes me even more aware that my country, small as it is, cannot afford to lag behind in the Dark Ages.” 

“And that is the purpose of your work?” Faraday sounded even more dubious than on the previous day.

Conrad took another sip of the whisky, trying to marshal his arguments. “I have seem a priest- a corrupt priest- close an iron fetter with a brush of his fingers so that you would never know it had not been forged whole. I have seen a woman walk unharmed across burning lava, freezing it at every footstep, and I lost half my hand to frostbite holding onto her. The Church says these are acts of God. The people believe that is what they are. Yet I have spoken to the creature that performs these events and I am certain that it is neither God nor Devil but as subject to natural law as your incandescent bulb, if only it could be studied as electricity is studied.”

He paused again, aware that he was taking a risk. “I speak now for myself, not for His Catholic Majesty. The Church uses these “miracles” to keep the people in fear and superstitious dread. You had your Reformation centuries ago, long before the miracles started. We may never have ours unless we loosen their grip. While here in Britain you flourish in your Age of Reason I wait in anxiety every day for news of my friend, held by the Inquisition for the heresy of denying the Catholic Church’s control over everything supernatural.”

Faraday nodded, as if some at least of the arguments had reached him. He leaned forward a little, though no-one else in the room could possibly have heard them. “England is not entirely devoid of these events. There is a woman who can do such things as you describe, who calls on neither God nor Devil nor wild spirits to do so. Perhaps it would assist in your research to speak to her.”

Conrad sat up, intrigued. “I have not heard of such a person in London.” 

“You would not have done.” Faraday said. “In England, and Scotland too, these matters are considered by the uneducated to be evidence of witchcraft. We do not have the Inquisition, God be thanked, but since coming to the Capital she has wisely demonstrated her skills only to a handful of ,members of the Royal Society and myself.” 

He shrugged. “They are undoubtedly remarkable but neither of us could see how we could incorporate them into our researches on natural philosophy. This experimental subject seems to fit your need rather than ours.” 

Michael Faraday drew a paper out of his pocket and passed it over. “Her address. I am sure you need no urging to be discreet.”

 

The coach left Conrad at the gate of a moderately sized house in Bethnal Green, just outside the edge of the city. Walking down the path towards the arched doorway he could see green everywhere in the garden, flourishing in the still persistent rain.

A knock brought a woman to the door. She was in her fifties, he estimated, and was dressed in overalls and peeling soiled gloves off her hands.

“Good morning.” He had no idea whether she was a servant or not. “My name is Conrad Scalese. Am I speaking to Mrs Hergon?”

Her rather dour face briefly lit up. “The librettist? How extraordinary! Come in, do. I’m Abigail Hergon. You’re a long way from home, Mr Scalese.”

She led him through thorough to a kitchen at the back of the house. Every surface was covered with plants and flowers. Even the kitchen table had trays with rows of seedlings along it, and a tottering pile of small plant pots.

“I should finish this,” she said, “But we can talk while I do it. Put the kettle on the hob, Mr Scalese.” She gestured towards a leaping fire and a copper kettle lying next to it.

“Conrad, please.” He lifted the kettle, finding it already full, and moved it onto the hearth. Abigail was already seated at table, carefully pinching seedlings out of the trays and repotting them. 

“So,” she asked, her eyes and hands on the task. “Does your presence here mean that your opera might be performed in England? I would very much like to see the _Terror of Paris_.”

Conrad blinked. “That’s not why I’m in London,” he said cautiously. “You have an interest in opera?”

“I have to confess to a slight preference for the Italian opera over English oratorio,” she said matter of factly. “But so much depends on the skill of the singers and the inspiration of the composers. If you have not come for opera, I suppose it must be to do with the other thing.” She seemed a little disappointed. 

“I was given your name by Professor Faraday,” Conrad said, distinctly unsure of his ground. “He said that you could do miracles.”

“Miracles!” She snorted in disdain. “Do I look like Christ the Almighty? I can neither perform miracles nor cast spells. I merely wish.”

“Could you show me this wishing?”

“I could. Let me find something.” She walked around the kitchen, inspecting her plants. “Ah. Poor thing.” The small plant in the pot she recovered from a windowsill had browned, drooping leaves. Placing it on the table, she considered it for a moment then reached out and touched a damaged leaf.

Green spread from her fingertips, through the visible veins. The leaves filled out, glossy and plump, and two stalks sprouted, uncurling to show flowers of striped purple and white. Within seconds the plant had pulled itself up to eight inches tall and was clearly flourishing. 

Nodding satisfaction to herself, Abigail added a little water to the compost and replaced it in the window. 

“Plants want to grow,” she told Conrad. “It is hardly a miracle when they do.”

“That is remarkable,” Conrad said. “What else can you do?”

“What can I do?” She looked puzzled. “If I gave you a pen and paper, what could you write, Conrad Scalese?” 

“Anything I could imagine,” he said. “You can do anything?“ His eyes dropped to her hands, back to patiently pricking out seedlings. “You could be a Queen.”

“And why would I want to? Look.” She waved a casual hand at the hearth and steam exploded out of the kettle. “I have saved us ten minutes of waiting for our pot of tea. Was that really worth changing the world for?” She got to her feet and wrapped a cloth carefully around the kettle handle so that she could pour the scalding water into the waiting teapot.

“There is a cost for this power,” Conrad guessed.

“Not that I know of.” Abigail frowned at him. “How can I explain? Did Professor Faraday show you his demonstration of induction?”

“Yes, Conrad said. “It seemed to me a major discovery. When we understand electricity better we might do wonders.” 

“Indeed,” Abigail said. “And if I had been there to turn the bulb on and off as I chose, to transmute the wires into gold and suspend the whole apparatus in the air two feet off the bench- would that have made his experiment one jot more significant?”

“it would merely have confused the issue,” Conrad said. 

“Perfectly put. This power is not of itself evil, it is not harmful, it does not cost the user, but it tends to confuse matters. Just as you would not write without anything to say merely because you have paper, so I do not act without need merely because I have the ability. Milk and sugar?”

Over the pot of tea Conrad told Abigail the full story of the Black Opera. She listened with detached interest, only asking a couple of questions about the qualities of Leonora’s voice. At the end she nodded.

“Poor creature,” she said. “Everyone shouting at it.”

“Do you know why it listens to you?” Conrad asked.

She sighed. “Once I was as determined as your Leonora that all of creation would bend to my will. I brought it music and intransigence; how could it ignore me? After that,” she glanced down at her empty cup, “I imagine that it must be accustomed to me now, as you would pick out a familiar face from a crowd, even though I speak little and quietly. Will the Aztec Princess be performed again?”

“I hope so,”Conrad said. “But I do fear that it will draw the attention of the creature, and we have no control over what it might do.”

“That’s simple,” she said. “Just be certain of what you want. Nothing else.”

She placed the china cup and saucer back on the table and glanced towards her unfinished task. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Conrad.”

Conrad got to his feet. He had more questions but none of them were pressing enough to be uncivil about. “I am extremely grateful for your time and the information. You have been of more assistance than I imagined possible. ”

She looked up at him, frowning faintly. “You haven’t asked for anything, Mr Scalese. Everybody asks for something.”

He flexed his crippled hand, aware of what he was passing up. To play the violin again... “No, he said, the harshness in his voice for himself, not her. “There has been enough confusion in my life already. I can manage without another miracle.”

Her strict face bent slightly in a smile. “Then I have something to offer to you, though you can refuse it if you like. While you were talking I became aware of something, unrequested, which happens occasionally. It has nothing to do with me so I presume it has to do with your story. It is just a brief observation. You may hear it or not as you choose.”

“What will happen if I do?”

She shrugged. “No-one can tell the future. It is not a prophecy or a seeing. I think it is a true observation, if that helps, but that is not the same as being useful.”

It related to his story. For a moment Conrad hesitated but an observation, however obtained, was not the same as a miracle and wasn’t information what he needed most? “Tell me.”

“Very well. There was a man thinking about you. His head was full of anger, music, pride and the terrible grief of abandonment.”

Grief of abandonment- Gods, how could Conrad bear it! He’d trusted Ferdinand, three full weeks ago, and Roberto was still imprisoned. “Is he hurt?”

She shook her head.. “All I know is that pain is not what he was thinking about fifteen minutes ago. I know nothing else at all, Conrad. I did say that it might not be at all useful.”


	6. Betrayals

Conrad was all too conscious that the public entrance to the Palace was watched. By now a message would be going back to the Cardinal reporting on his return and his whereabouts. 

Maybe he should have waited for Tullio to bring him in through one of the quieter entrances, but no-one had been at home when he finally reached it and the sight of the neat, impersonal guest room, set out as if the Count had never been there, had spurred him into immediate action. He walked rapidly down the public galleries towards the audience chamber. On either side guards stood in front of the doors to the private areas but there was no concealment there- unfortunately he recognised none of them. 

Twenty feet or so in front of him one of those doors opened and the guard stood aside to let the tall, dark haired man with a scroll of papers under his arm emerge. Conrad paused a heart beat, then broke into an uncourtly run. He seized the man by his unencumbered arm. 

"Roberto! Thank heavens! Are you all right?" 

“Let go of me,” was all the Count said. 

"I thought you were still detained!" Conrad knew he was gabbling but he'd been in a state of high anxiety their the long trip back from London and he was utterly relieved. “How long have you been here?”

“I truly would like nothing better than to strike you down right here,” Roberto said in a low voice. “I suggest that you let go of me and get yourself out of my sight before I succumb to the temptation.”

Conrad released his arm. Immediately Roberto turned and walked back the way he had come. The scowling guard blocked Conrad from following - the conversation had been too low for him to hear but the Conte's anger must have been obvious. 

There was nothing for Conrad to do but to follow his original plan. He continued slowly now, his mind full of bewilderment and worry, along to the audience hall.

 

“You are supposed to be in England.”

Conrad had waited for five hours in the public ante-chamber for this meeting. He was exhausted and hungry and Kind Ferdinand 11, seated behind a desk in what must be his private study, had made no gesture for him to sit down. Conrad did his best to pull his thoughts together to reply.

“My apologies, Sire if my return has displeased you. There was nothing more of any use that I could do there and I had received a message suggesting that the Conte di Argente was in urgent danger.”

“Him again?” Ferdinand did not sound pleased. “Your message was wrong. Capiraso was released unharmed into my custody two days after you left the country. Since then he has been a not particularly welcome guest in the Palace. I did tell you to leave the matter of the man to me, did I not?”

The King had got him away from the Inquisition in just two days. Shit. Conrad was slowly and exhaustedly realising that he’d just insulted his monarch as well as disobeying him.

“Then I was entirely misinformed,” he said humbly. “I truly am sorry if I gave offence. And I am extremely grateful for what you did for him.” 

Ferdinand’s frown didn’t waver. “Corrado. Listen to me. You’re getting quite a reputation which will only be enhanced when _L’Altezza_ is performed. I have no doubt that you will be invited to write for some of the greatest composers of the age.”

His eyes were sharp on Conrad’s face. “ I brought you and Capiraso together, something that I have come to believe would have been a mistake even if the man hadn’t gone on to betray everyone and everything he stood for. He can compose opera, undoubtedly, but you can never have an objective professional relationship with him while that woman stands between you and you both know that. 

It was the King speaking. Conrad could only stand and listen. 

"Your libretto is finished. Your sibling is handling the role of impresario with surprising competence for one so young. The Count can manage the orchestration and he can doubtless manage his ex wife in the leading role. Walk away from it, Corradino. Write an opera with someone else. This one will serve its purpose to make your reputation without the need for you to ever speak to Roberto Capiraso again."

Ferdinand had put aside his justified anger to give him the wisest counsel that he could and Conrad had no way to explain the misconceptions on which it was based. 

He tried anyway. “I'm grateful for your concern, Sire, but he and I have enough of an understanding to let us work together still." Perhaps. _Nothing better than to strike you down_ , Roberto had said. "And regardless of that, _L'Altezza_ means a great deal more to me than an easy life would. It is the opera of miracles. No one else can take my part."

Ferdinand sighed. “I can’t command any of my subjects to wisdom, I suspect you least of all. But you have more immediate concerns right now. Your return has been observed. I received a very polite request from the Cardinal this afternoon that I acknowledge the outstanding warrant against you.”

Conrad turned his empty palms outwards. “As ever, Sire, I am in your hands.” His heart was beating faster.

“Yet what you are not,” the King said sharply, “is in England and away from this trouble. I have told the Cardinal that neither you nor Capiraso will set foot outside the palace until I permit it. I have also told him that a room will be made available here should the Inquisition wish to question you in a civilised manner tomorrow.”

His eyebrows rose at Conrad’s shocked expression. “I cannot wave my hand and make this mess disappear this time, Corrado. You did write the damn thing, after all. I can keep you out of their cells for now but you and your composer will have to figure out how to get them off your backs for the future. It’s that or run to Protestant Europe and stay there.”

Conrad nodded, there being nothing else he could do.

“I presume that you managed to carry out at least some of the task you were sent to England for before your precipitate return?”

“I did.” Conrad said. 

“Good. We can discuss it when I am less busy and you are less preoccupied.” He waved a hand at the door. “You will stay in the guest wing until this is resolved. There is everything that you might need for a short stay, including paper and ink, your errant composer and a well equipped music room. Please don’t go wandering around elsewhere. I have no doubt Rosso will catch up with you before long.”

Conrad bowed and backed out.

“And Corrado!” Ferdinand said as he reached the door. “If you intend to continue to make the Two Sicilies your home you _will_ be available to speak to the Cardinal’s representative tomorrow.”

Conrad looked straight into his monarch’s unsmiling face and inclined his head. “Yes, Sire.”

 

The music was new. Conrad thought it might be rather good but at the moment it was impossible to be sure, since it was being played without no regard for either aesthetics or the limitations of the instrument.

Roberto hadn’t paused or glanced his way as he found a seat, not too close, and sat down to listen and wait. The high notes of the piano was already drifting out of tune as the keys were thumped gracelessly. As the Count seemed to gain some self control the music became more proficient yet still enraged.

Eventually the piece came to a crashing and unsettling climax and Roberto stilled, turning on the piano stool to face him.

“I’d be grateful if you’d tell me something, Corrado.” he said flatly. “I’m not accustomed to dealing with commoners. If I called you out would you turn up to die like a gentleman or just run away again?”

“I am truly sorry.” Conrad said. “I should have recognised the risk when I asked you to write the music.”

“Don't play games. You know that was the least of your betrayals.” 

Conrad blinked at him. “It’s the only thing I can think of that might make you this furious.”

“The only thing?” The Conte di Argente rose to his feet “What about the fact that you didn’t come back to the house after we disembarked?”

“I was angry with you,” Conrad said, frowning. “I wanted a little time alone.”

“You were certainly angry” Roberto’s voice was a low hiss. “And you knew the soldiers were there, waiting. You let me walk into an ambush, alone and unwarned. Then you fled the country, leaving me in the hands of the Inquisition with no hope but Ferdinand’s goodwill. How furious do you think I should be, my dear Corradino?”

Conrad stared at him, outraged. “The King's goodwill? He was going to leave you there, Capisaro, as long as he judged that your life wasn't in immediate danger. I had to beg him to intercede for you! I was given no choice when he sent me to England and I've incurred a great deal of royal displeasure, not to mention trouble with our enemies, because I came back early. Because I was worried about you!”

He was on his feet now as well. “I knew nothing of the arrest warrant when we came back here. How could I? And do you really judge me to be the sort of man who would deliberately put you in the hands of the Inquisition?”

Roberto hadn't softened. “You do have an incentive for getting me out of the way.” 

“I wouldn't buy even the certain assurance of her lifelong affections at such a price! For fucks sake, Roberto!” He struggled for a reasoned response. “I wrote the fucking thing that got you arrested and I suppose that I can’t expect you to just overlook that in the circumstances. I don’t think much of your idea of honour and I’m not going to let you shoot me at dawn but if you desire it I’ll resign my involvement in the production of _L’Altezza_ so you don’t have to work with me again.” 

He wondered if Ferdinand had already known the magnitude of the man’s grudge when he had suggested that Conrad do just that.

Roberto’s look was utter contempt. “Did you know that the Governor General of Naples has been forbidden to leave that city? It has been a month, in case you were too busy sightseeing to note the passage of time. She has been captive in Naples and I have been captive in this bloody place while you have been off to England ‘on Institute business’. Did you get the opportunity to hear much music while you were there? I understand the King’s Theatre production of The Marriage of Figaro has been well spoken of?”

It had indeed been a spirited performance, Conrad had watched it from the Royal Box as the guest of the Duke of Sussex. He didn’t feel that saying so was going to help. “This is hardly captivity!” he protested.

“I am informed that the King will be unable to guarantee my safety if I leave these walls,” Roberto said. “I cannot confirm this myself since he hasn’t deigned to speak so much as a word to his supposed guest since I was marched back here by his guard. A month ago, Scalese! And you think this matter can be settled by an undertaking to resign the fucking opera?”

All the way home Conrad had imagined the man in fetters, or safe in his arms. Not this. He pushed himself back into the chair and looked up at the thunderous face. Shouting wouldn’t help.

“I deny any malice or cowardice whatsoever. Nonetheless, as I said, this is my fault. Before I ask you what you want me to do about it you should probably know that I’m also constrained by the King’s orders. I too am to stay here until he says otherwise, and tomorrow I will be required to answer the Inquisition’s questions. It is quite possible that you will be expect to do the same.”

Fleeting shock passed over Roberto’s face before he blanked it. “Is there anything else that you should have told me?”

Conrad wanted to tell him about Abigail Hergon and the miracles, but this wasn’t the time. “I don’t think so.”

Roberto collected up the sheets of music from the piano stand and stalked out. “Do you intend to just sit there?” he called back without turning. Conrad presumed that was his signal to follow.

The Count’s rooms were a few doors away from Conrad’s. He glanced around the small sitting room while Roberto checked the closed shutters and lit a second lamp. There was a door off to a dressing room with presumably the bedroom beyond. It seemed comfortable enough, if a little bare of anything personal. The man had been here a month, he thought. What a mess. 

“So what are you going to tell them?” Roberto demanded, pouring himself a glass of wine and taking an armchair by the empty hearth. He seemed to have mastered his anger; his voice was as dispassionate as if he were a stranger.

“The truth, I suppose.” Conrad said. “The King is right- I have to settle matters somehow with the Church or neither of us can live freely in any Catholic country.

“That will mean at the least penance and public retraction,” Roberto said. “Will you really agree to that?”

“I brought you into this,” Conrad said. “If that’s what it takes to get you free of it, I have no other choice.” The thought of making any public statement to the dictation of the Church made him sick to the stomach but he was backed into a corner of his own making and the Conte di Argente was trapped alongside him.

“And when the Inquisition insists that you make a public statement recanting your atheism?”

“No-one would believe it for a moment. Not with my reputation.”

“But would you do it?” Roberto was leaning forward now as if he were conducting an inquisition of his own.

There was a second glass on the sideboard. Conrad helped himself to wine, then paced the rug, drinking it.

“No,” he said finally. “I’m sorry, Roberto, but I couldn’t do that. I swear that I’ll do what I can to get you out of this, but that... I can’t.” Not even if it meant London’s fog and rain for the both of them. He couldn’t publicly deny the one certainty of his life. 

Roberto sat back in the chair and sighed. “Well, I suppose that I might have to accept the rest of it now. If you’d lied about that I’d have known not to believe you.” 

His smile was faint but definitely there. “I doubt if it will come to that in the end anyway. The verses were careless but not outrageous., The Cardinal might want your wrist slapped but he won’t want to antagonise Ferdinand by overreaching against one of the King’s favourites. Acceptance of a little public humiliation will probably see an end to the matter without you having to perjure your beloved theological certitude. If you’d stayed to face the music a month ago this could have been long since settled.” 

He had felt terrible grief at being abandoned, Abigail had said. It was not that surprising if he lacked sympathy for Conrad’s immediate and uncomfortable prospects. Conrad drank off the rest of the wine and kept his temper. He suspected that the next bit of this conversation could go particularly badly.

“I do need to know what you have told them already,” he said, trying to keep his tone neutral. “Contradicting you might get us both into more trouble.”

“You’re asking whether I broke and told them everything?” There was scorn in the Count’s voice. 

“You didn’t tell them everything.” Conrad said with conviction. “And you didn’t break. But they had three days to ask you questions and I’m sure you were smart enough to give them some answers. I need to set my words to your music if we’re going to play them something harmonious enough to pass.” 

There was silence. Roberto seemed have acquired an interest in a painting of ships on the wall. Suddenly Conrad grasped the likely problem. 

“You thought I’d deliberately betrayed you into their hands. I imagine that in the circumstances you might have made no attempt to protect me. I do understand that and I swear I’ll hold no grudge. But I still need to know exactly what it was that you said, Roberto, or tomorrow could go badly for both of us!”

Roberto walked over to the wine and refilled both their glasses. “I told them that you had asked for a ballad tune for a comic opera you told me that you were working on. That I had no idea of the nature of the verses until I heard my tune sung in the street.” His voice was flat.

“Did they believe you?” 

“And how did it matter what they believed? I would testify that the verses were yours- that’s what they cared about. If you didn’t come back from your flight to England and they needed a scapegoat they could always extract something more confessional from me later.”

He drained the glass in a single gulp. “They knew about Leonora, of course, but it didn’t seem to have occurred to them that you and I might be fucking. You’ll be relieved to know that I wasn’t quite furious enough with you to land myself into that sort of trouble.”

“Very well.” Conrad couldn’t afford to have an emotional reaction to any of this, not right now. “We’ll stick to your story. I lied to you about the ballad and you knew nothing. Is there anything else I need to know before tomorrow?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“More than enough,” Conrad put the half full glass down carefully without looking again at Roberto, then walked back to his room.


	7. Truth Telling

The afternoon sun beat down hot against the back of his neck, but Conrad didn’t have the energy to roll off the bed and close the shutters. Maybe if he just lay here for long enough he’d somehow manage to sleep.

A knock on the outer door must be the maid come back for the untouched lunch tray on the table in the sitting room. Conrad ignored it, his eyes still closed. He couldn’t manage politeness to strangers, not right now. With any luck she would collect it and leave without glancing into the bedroom and he could pretend not to be there

“Not a good meeting, then.” Roberto’s voice came from the direction of the doorway. 

“Close the shutters, will you?” Conrad said without so much as twitching. The bedroom door closed and footsteps crossed to the window. There was the scrape of the wooden shutters closing.

“What happened?” The bed shifted; apparently Roberto had sat down on it.

“I talked for three hours to a sanctimonious, superstitious, uneducated and irrational bully called Fedrico. I might just as well have kept silent.”

“You’re entirely incapable of keeping silent, Corradino.” Capiraso sounded almost amused. “Not when you believe that you’re right. You convinced them of something anyway. I am informed that as I am no longer wanted by the Inquisition I am free to go.”

Conrad lifted his head a little at that. “At least that worked out. Do you intend to stay in Palermo long enough to witness my penance or will you go straight to Naples? You’ll need to be there for the first rehearsals in a couple of weeks anyway. And you’ll need a new impresario unless you intend to take on the role yourself. Paolo can’t manage that and her symphony in Palermo simultaneously.”

It hurt to know that _L’Altezza_ would go on without him. Still, he was determined that it should be a success, even if he had to call instructions from the side lines occasionally. After all Roberto’s previous experience of putting on a full length opera had been primarily concerned with sabotaging it. 

“What might it take to persuade you back to the opera?” Roberto asked. 

“Persuade me?” Conrad rolled on his side so that he could stare at the man. “I don’t want to leave. But I thought you wouldn’t work with me again.”

“That was your suggestion, not mine. And made before you found out what I’d told the Inquisition. I rather assumed that would have changed things.” 

“You made the only sensible decision.” Conrad had been over this in his head a score of times since the previous evening. “You were in their hands. They knew you’d written the music. If you had denied it they would have put their questions more forcibly until eventually you would have told then that and more besides. And, not incidentally, you’d now be facing perjury charges instead of walking away. Lying to them would have been stupid. I wouldn’t have done it.”

“I think you underestimate both your stupidity and your character.” Roberto said, “For as long as you believed that your silence protected me you’d have endured a great deal to retain it. The end result would probably have been calamitous for both of us but at least you would have tried. I didn’t.”

For once Conrad could be sure that the acid in the Count’s voice wasn’t aimed at him. 

“You thought I’d betrayed you.” he protested. “You had no reason to shield me.”

“And do you not think that I believed that precisely because it justified what I was doing? Stop making excuses for me, Corrado. I will not accept them.” 

Conrad propped himself up on the back of the bed so he could be more vehement. “Regardless of what you choose to accept, the truth is that you did me no harm! I had already decided to admit to authorship of the verses before I found out that you’d confessed the music.

“I have been in the chains of the Inquisition, albeit for a far shorter time than you. I do nor forget what it was like. I am more relieved than I can possibly say that you gave them answers that kept their physical torments at bay. How do you think I would have lived with the guilt if my carelessness had maimed you? “

“You forgive too easily,” Capiraso said. “I have the capacity to do you limitless harm.”

“I know that. But isn’t that true of anyone one is vulnerable to? I judge that it’s worth the risk.” 

Roberto’s eyes narrowed.”There are other composers, you know, if it’s about the music.”

Conrad’s temper frayed. “Do you intend to make me say this, when I know I won’t get a word in response? I have spent all morning being mocked for the truth and now I have to spend this afternoon the same way. No, it is not about the music. It is not about Leonora. It is not about your company in bed, welcome though that was.”

“So what is it about?” Roberto demanded.

“It is about how if you were a woman I would be on my knees by now, begging you to listen to how I feel! Is that enough for you to ridicule?”

“You could try getting on your knees anyway,” Roberto suggested, his voice dry. 

Conrad glared at him. “Do you think of nothing but ways to humiliate me?” 

“Yesterday you claimed the month I spent trapped in here was your fault. You asked me to tell you what I wanted you to do about it. Well, this is what I want. You on your knees, Scalese, and honest words in your mouth.”

He laughed at Conrad’s expression.”I told you that I could do you harm. Throw me out if you prefer. Break your word. Or beg.”

For the moment Conrad couldn’t remember why he felt anything for this man. “I don’t forget what happened last time you made me beg something of you, di Argente. It seems that you have become no less vindictive since.”

“Have I not cause?” Roberto demanded. “Why should I be as recklessly forgiving of your sins as you have been of mine? I have named what I want. What do you choose to do?”

Conrad was as hotly furious as he had not been since the man’s treachery had first been revealed. If that had been enough to turn his heart away then maybe there would have been some hope for him but even in the extremes of his anger he knew that he couldn’t bear to cut the ties between them for good. Given that, what choice did he have?

Stiffly, reluctantly, he climbed off the bed and, his gaze on Roberto all daggers and unflinching, came round to knee on the King’s fine rug.

“Now beg me to listen to how you feel.” Roberto wasn’t smiling now.

“Fuck you, Capiraso! What kind of sick satisfaction does this afford you?”

“Do it.” 

“You wanted honesty, you said. I won’t beg for something I don’t want.”

Roberto’s eyebrow rose. “Resorting to sophistry now? Very well then. Skip the begging. Just tell me how you feel.”

Conrad looked up at the dark face and spat the words out. “I missed you. I want you. I lie awake and ache for you as much as I do for Nora. I think I’m probably in love with you, may the devil take you. Is that enough?”

Roberto broke out in peals of laugher, while Conrad stumbled to his feet and tried not to succumb to the temptation to slap him. 

“Now isn’t that a librettist all over? He takes an entire operatic drama, not to mention a great deal of assistance from his poor hardworking composer, to say one line.” 

“You didn’t help.” Conrad snapped. 

“Of course I did. Left to your own devices you’d still be mute.” 

“And you wouldn’t be mocking my feelings. You did not help, Roberto! You never help!”

Roberto stopped laughing, but his eyes still shone. “I don’t mock your feelings, Corradino. I’m just amused by how difficult you make this.” He pushed himself to his feet and limped over to Conrad, reaching out to put his hands around his shoulders. “I have no doubt that I’m in love with you. There. See how easy it is to say?”

Conrad could feel his fingers pressing warm against the back of his neck. His anger was disintegrating in a chaos of other feelings but he managed to glare up at the smug face. “That’s because that _was_ easy. I would be considerably more impressed if you had been the one to say that first!”

“You have a point there. I could have done. However my way was far more entertaining. Shall we argue about it further or shall we go to bed?”

 

They argued about it in bed for a while, after other more urgent priorities were satisfied. This was one matter on which Conrad was determined not to be recklessly forgiving. It had been unnecessary and cruel. Roberto cheerfully admitted to the cruelty but insisted on the necessity. 

“You never say anything of what you feel, Corradino, and I cannot guess what goes on behind those twin walls of politeness and courage. You came back to face down the Inquisition to save my life and I still didn’t know if I meant anything more to you than as a casual lover and a rival.”

“You could have just asked!” Conrad pointed out.

“I wanted the truth, not polite evasions, and there was leverage that I could use to get it. It did you no harm, Corrado. I knew that if you told me you loved me then I could say the same and you wouldn’t stay angry for long.”

“Yet I’m still angry,” Conrad insisted.

Fingers wound around the hair on his chest. “You asked me if I was going to stay in Palermo, remember?”

That conversation had felt like days ago. “And?”

“And whatever the Church decrees your penance is, I will stand with you. We will go to Naples together when this is done, and Leonora can make her accommodations. _L’Altezza_ will be the greatest opera in Italy and then you and I will write an operatic comedy that will have the Dead die again from laughing. Do you still think that you can stay angry with me for long?”

“Probably not,” Conrad conceded. “But I’m still going to try.”

“Fool,” Roberto said, almost affectionately, and kissed him.


	8. Finale

Green and blue sheeted over the sky, the flickering light illuminating the audience on their feet cheering. Silence fell as everyone in the auditorium looked upward.

“Conrad!” Ferdinand demanded. “What is it?”

Conrad was grinning, utterly elated and relieved. “Aurorae, Sire. Seneca describes them in his Naturales Quaestiones. The Swedish philosophers speculate that they are linked to the magnetic pull of the Earth. “

“The Northern Lights?” Ferdinand said, his face tilted upwards against the incredible sight. “In Naples? What new disaster do they portend?”

“None, Sire. We have made you a miracle that does no harm.” He looked back at the stage, where Leonora stood, her arms raised to the flickering sky, delight in her eyes. Roberto had turned away from the orchestra and was clambering up to join her.

“Go then, join them” Ferdinand told him. “Reassure my people that the world is not about to end before we have a riot on our hands.” 

Conrad climbed rapidly down to the stage and took Leonora’s still upraised hand. Beside her Roberto did the same on the other side The green light shone and shivered on their faces and on the crowd who had started to get noisy again.

“People of Naples!” Roberto’s baritone voice was strong enough to project across the crowd. “We have brought you L’Altezza, Leonora and the greatest aurora of the skies that the two Sicilies have ever seen!” All three swept down together, perfectly timed, in the stagiest of bows and the crowd erupted again, while the rest of the cast came belatedly forward to receive their share of adulation under the unearthly bright Naples sky.


End file.
